Smartphones store and/or have access to the owner's personal and work-related information. For instance, many smartphone owners store a vast amount of personal information on their smartphone such as financial information, address information, contacts, photos, texts, personal email, etc. Additionally, many companies have implemented bring your own device (BYOD) programs to save money by enabling employees to access work-related information using their personal smartphones. For example, the smartphone may store confidential information such as email, documents, spreadsheets, calendar, contacts, etc. Further, smartphones may have access to company databases and servers that may store a vast amount of other client confidential information.
Smartphone theft is becoming an increasingly common problem. Currently, mobile operating systems include few access protection features to prevent unauthorized persons from fraudulently accessing the smartphone. For example, many mobile operating systems include a lock code features that forces a user to enter an appropriate pin number in order to gain access to the smartphone. While this feature may prevent unauthorized access in some instances, most owners do not use such features since it requires them to enter the pin number each time they wish to access their smartphone, which can be numerous times a day for some people. Some smartphones have biometric access protection features such as a fingerprint scanner or facial recognition camera. While these features may be more convenient that lock codes, they can produce false positives thereby enabling access to the smartphone by an unauthorized person.
Once a thief or another unauthorized person gains access to the smartphone, they can change the smartphone's security settings to enable future access to the smartphone. For example, they can deactivate the lock code and possibly the biometric access features. Additionally, they may alter the security settings by, for example, providing a new lock code or a new biometric template for use with the fingerprint scanner or facial recognition camera.
Additionally, the thief or unauthorized person may obtain personal (e.g., financial) and/or work-related information stored on the smartphone or accessible by the smartphone. Exacerbating the situation is the fact that many mobile operating systems and mobile applications have settings that automatically store passwords thereby obviating any safeguards afforded by password protection.
One current “solution” is to remotely wipe the smartphone in order to remove all information. However, if the smartphone does not have a communications connection, the smartphone cannot receive the wiping instruction and, as a result, will not wipe the smartphone. Lastly, when a smartphone is stolen or accessed by an unauthorized person, the owner may mistakenly believe that the phone is lost and may spend hours looking for the phone before implementing a remote wipe solution (if it's available). During this time, the unauthorized person may access valuable personal and work-related information of the owner and may store this information on a storage device (e.g., a computer) for later use.
Accordingly, there is a persistent need to prevent unauthorized access to content stored on or accessible by smartphone devices.